At a rally to defund Planned Parenthood on Capitol Hill Tuesday, GOP presidential candidate and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson criticized Planned Parenthood, calling it “hypocritical” that “these same people who say that it’s a meaningless clump of cells are trying to get livers and lungs and kidneys.”

“I’ve spent so many nights in the operating room, all night long, working, toiling so hard to save one of those lives, and you know one of the most wonderful aspects of life is later on you can see that same little baby as a 25- or 30-year-old who has their own little baby, and yet there was somebody at some point saying that it was just a clump of cells that didn’t mean anything,” said Carson.

“Well isn’t it funny that these same people who say that it’s a meaningless clump of cells are trying to get livers and lungs and kidneys, because how could you have such organs from a meaningless clump of cells,” Carson said. “They’re obviously being hypocritical, but here is the worse thing about all of that.

Carson was speaking at a rally organized by Women Betrayed, a project of Students for Life of America and Pro-Life Future, to call for an investigation into Planned Parenthood as well as defunding them. The Capitol Hill rally was one of more than 60 rallies across the nation organized by Women Betrayed.

“I think we have gradually slid in terms of our morals to a point where we don’t really care about the killing of human beings,” he said. “That is the bad news. The good news is that I think we are changing, and I think things like this are starting to change us a lot. There are actually more people now who identify as pro-life than people who identify as pro-death, and we are capable of changing.

“There was a time in this country when people thought it was okay to own other people, and they thought they could do anything they want with them, because they belong to me. I can beat them, I can kill them, I can do whatever I want to do to them, and we fortunately, as a society matured and began to think about what the words of our Declaration of Independence and the words of our Constitution actually meant,” Carson said.

“Well those words are meaningful today too, because they talk about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Well guess what. There can be no liberty and pursuit of happiness if there is no life,” Carson said.

As CNSNews.com reported, on Tuesday Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) asked Paul, Lankford, and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to create a plan to defund Planned Parenthood before the August recess. At the rally, Paul said there would be a vote to defund Planned Parenthood before the August recess.